A relaxing Saturday afternoon

On a balmy Saturday afternoon in July, I drove out to one of my favourite places, Lapham Peak state park. Having grown up just several miles from the park, it’s a place I’ve spent time in at many points in my life. And the different parts of it – the observation tower, the butterfly garden, the hilly wooded trails, and the vast prairie meadows – bear an entire network of emotional and memory connections to people in my life.

I spent time out there as a child with my parents and older relatives, all long since passed away. I hiked the trails with friends in my childhood and teens. Since moving back to Wisconsin with my wife Andi, we’ve visited the park and introduced my own children to it, even making the long trek one dusty, hot summer day, at the insistence of my youngest, to Nemahbin Spring at the northernmost edge.

Joy of nature

What does this have to do with Stoicism and joy, you might ask? The last trip I took back in July was on my own. I’ve hiked by myself all over the park in summer, when my children aren’t with me, and it’s too hot and humid to prove a fun time for my wife. The entire park offers a variety of possible itineraries, each with their own charms (and sometimes challenges), but in this season, the portion I like best is the vast meadowland, a veritable land-sea of grasses and flowers, here and there broken up by solitary trees, brambles and bushes, copses and groves, or even densely wooded ridgelines, all crisscrossed and traversed by long windy trails that you can walk for miles.

Taking those walks is a source of great, but mixed, joy for me. It offers immersion in a familiar and well-loved natural environment, the vast cloud-dappled sky overhead, breezes fluttering tree leaves together, the sun beaming down broken up by cloud-cast shadows, and the flowers. Right then in mid-July the daisies were at their end, replaced by black-eyed-susans and purple coneflowers. Other white blooms took their place, like the yarrows, queen-annes-lace, and elderberry bushes. Pinks and purples of bergamot, milkweed, vetch, and thistle contrast against the brilliant orange of butterfly weed. The fields are full of movement, buzzing, and song. Bumblebees and honeybees, butterflies from monarchs to sulphurs, birds of all sorts, and even the stray dragonfly. Here and there, you can pluck sweet clover or spicy beebalm, and suck nectar from the petals, as I did so often in my childhood, and the blackberries are coming into season, offering the traveler bounty to pick and enjoy.

Joy of solitude

As I hiked in the near solitude – you cross other hikers occasionally, say hello, and continue on – I felt a great joy rising in my heart at the multifarious beauty I encountered, rich beyond adequate description. It was powerful, and intermixed with several other feelings. A great gratitude over being able once again to experience all that beauty in a place that had unfolded it to me and to companions so many previous seasons. The sense of home, of familiarity, of belonging to that landscape that I grew up with. It was very powerful, and I found myself brought near to the point of tears as I marched slowly on, and then for a short space, giving in to them, sobbing as I walked.

Reconnecting to past experiences

Why, you might ask? It was partly remembering, reconnecting with all those people absent either in distance or in death, with whom I’d shared these experiences in past visits and hikes. Their absences, the losses of them, the passing of the times that once were, those provoke or awaken a species of sadness.

Sadness as a memorial for good things

From a strictly and literal Stoic perspective, that is a negative emotion, something bad for us to feel, not something to be encouraged or indulged in. But my experiences make me wonder whether there isn’t something also good to be gained when these emotions are felt in connection and conjunction with joy. Particularly when such sadness or even grief is a way of memorializing the love, the companionship, the sharing we formerly enjoyed with other human beings, and when the bond included the positive experience of great beauty.

Greg Sadler of ReasonIO is an educator and the editor of Stoicism Today (ModernStoicism.com).

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